![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.conversiondiary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/7_quick_takes_sm1.jpg\" "\\"7_quick_takes_sm\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u2014 1 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n The wheels have been set in motion for this year\u2019s Ideological Turing Test, where Christians and Atheists imitate each other in order to understand each other better. \u00a0You can contribute to the giant brainstorming thread and help pick the topic and format<\/a>. \u00a0(In year one, we did standards of evidence, year two: authority and aesthetics).<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 2 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n But speaking of shibboleths, I was delighted by the final word in the Scripps Spelling Bee:\u00a0knaidel (meaning matzo ball or dumpling). \u00a0No sooner the Merriam-Webster judges declared the victor than the kibbitzing began. \u00a0Via the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>:<\/a><\/p>\n The preferred spelling has historically been kneydl, according to transliterated Yiddish orthography decided upon by linguists at\u00a0the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research<\/a>, the organization based in Manhattan recognized by many Yiddish speakers as the authority on all things Yiddish\u2026<\/p>\n While most languages were formalized by national governments and their sanctioned language academies, Yiddish had no country and so relied on organizations like YIVO, which is the Yiddish acronym for Yiddish Scientific Institute and was based before World War II in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania. Experts like YIVO\u2019s Max Weinreich and his son, Uriel, who compiled a Yiddish-English dictionary, set clear guidelines about how the language should be transliterated into English \u2014 though in that famously disputatious Jewish world those instructions were not always appreciated or obeyed.<\/p>\n For instance, rather than the \u201cch\u201d in words like chutzpah and challah, the YIVO wordsmiths preferred \u201ckh\u201d because the \u201cch\u201d could lead someone to a softer pronunciation, as in choice or chicken. YIVO uses the \u201ckh\u201d in words like khutspe (chutzpah), but most Yiddish speakers prefer the more popular variants.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Don\u2019t worry. \u00a0Amid all the controversy, the\u00a0Times<\/em> kept their eye on the ball and answered the question that had been burning within me since I heard the result:<\/p>\n Although he has never tasted a knaidel or a kneidl, [Arvind, the winner] will soon. He said his seventh-grade science teacher, Carol Lipton, had promised to bring one to school on Monday.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 3 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n Since it was spelling bee season, the folks at Wonkblog explain why the bee is a uniquely American tradition<\/a>.<\/p>\n One major reason is that spelling bees are only really challenging in English, a language that has borrowed lots of roots and words from other languages and has all sorts of odd vowel sounds and spelling irregularities. By contrast, a Spanish or German or Russian spelling bee would be boring \u2014 as soon as you can sound out a word, you can probably spell it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Well, they may have easy to follow orthography, but we<\/em> have The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee<\/a><\/p>\nhttp:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=qxQSTA1WAiw<\/a>\n <\/a>\u2014 4 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n Alas, since English lost its second person plural, we\u2019ve had to compensate as best we can. \u00a0So one new Bible translation decided to make the best of a bad lot<\/a>:<\/p>\n It turns out there are at least 4,720 verses (2,698 in the Hebrew Bible and 2,022 in the Greek) with\u00a0you plural<\/em>\u00a0translated as English \u201cyou\u201d which could lead a reader to think it is directed at him or her personally rather than the Church as a community.<\/p>\n So I initially set out to develop a plugin for a Bible\u00a0software project<\/a>\u00a0that would convert all \u201cYou plurals\u201d to \u201cY\u2019all\u201d for my Bible project. I liked it so much I decided to create a Google Chrome extension that does the same thing for some popular Bible websites (youversion.com<\/a>\/bible.com<\/a>,\u00a0biblegateway.com<\/a>,\u00a0biblehub.com<\/a>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Though my southern friends always told me that \u201cy\u2019all\u201d was second person\u00a0singular<\/em> and \u201call y\u2019all\u201d was the plural.<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 5 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n But framing and context matters. \u00a0In a recent study by Bullock, Gerber, Hill, and Hueber (\u201cPartisan Bias in Factual Beliefs About Politics<\/a>\u201c) the researchers found, as per usual, that committed partisans appear to live in separate worlds. \u00a0When asked a series of factual questions with known answers, their answers diverge sharply.<\/p>\n But when study participants were told that their answers would be scored and that they\u2019d be paid for each correct response, the gap narrowed. \u00a0Some pundits were enthused, but Bryan Caplan was less optimistic<\/a>:<\/p>\n Question for Bullock et al.: Are real-world democratic elections more like your treatment condition with incentives, or without?\u00a0 Given voters\u2019 low probability of decisiveness, the answer is clear: Real-world democratic elections closely resemble the treatment\u00a0without<\/em>\u00a0incentives.\u00a0 After all, if a voter votes under the influence of partisan bias, what happens to him?\u00a0\u00a0The same thing that would have happened if he voted responsibly<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 6 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n The thing that delights me most about Bullock et al\u2019s paper is that they took a \u201cknown\u201d finding, tweaked the experimental design a little, and were about to figure out how much the previous results represented a stable feature of reality or was context dependent. \u00a0The Pacific Standard has a nice feature piece<\/a> on how behavioural economists took a standard experiment (the ultimatum game<\/a>) global and found that responses varied more by culture than they expected.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, these slightly-tweaked experiments only get attention when they\u00a0differ<\/em> from the established wisdom. \u00a0Reinforcing it through replication is usually treated as trivial. \u00a0So maybe someone needs to find the specific context where social scientists are incentivized to pursue altruistic, rigorous error checking of older results. \u00a0And then we need to raise all grad students in that context.<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 7 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n This last take is apropos of nothing but its own marvelousness. \u00a0A group of people repurposed an entire Cold War destroyer ship in order to have a massive Battlestar Galactica\u00a0<\/em>LARP<\/a> (live action role play). \u00a0I heard about this last year, but since parts of it were going to be conducted in Swedish, I wept and had no excuse to buy a plane ticket. \u00a0But now, they\u2019re trying to come stateside. \u00a0(Possibly on the boat?).<\/p>\n Believe you me, I have subscribed to their newsletter.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n\n
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